Stanley Falkow

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Stanley Falkow, PhD, is widely known as the father of the field of molecular microbial pathogenesis, which is to study of how infecting microbes and host cells interact to cause disease at the molecular level. He formulated molecular Koch's postulates, which have guided the study of the microbial determinants of infectious diseases since the late 1980s.^[1]

Dr. Falkow's contributions to the field of microbiology have been enormous. By adopting highly unconventional perspectives for example, viewing infection as a process that ultimately is mediated by the host Dr. Falkow has made startling findings such as the discovery that infectious microbes employ genes that are activated only inside host cells. The fruits of his work range from clinical applications, such as a new vaccine for whooping cough, to such fundamental advances in knowledge as the discovery of how cells are penetrated by bacteria. Dr. Falkow is professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Dr. Falkow graduated cum laude from the University of Maine in 1955. He received both his Master of Science and PhD degrees in biology from Brown University. Dr. Falkow's early work in the 1960s focused on the genetic mechanisms that enable populations of bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics. He demonstrated that organisms such as shigella can possess gene fragments called plasmids that exist apart from the bacterial chromosome and that they carry specialized information for survival. Under selective pressure from antibiotics, one species of bacteria can pass its plasmids to another unidirectionally rather than by mating, thereby preserving its own specialized survival genes. At the University of Washington in Seattle, Dr. Falkow was able to employ these findings to describe how meningitis and gonorrhea organisms acquire plasmids to become resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics.

In the 1970s, Dr. Falkow shifted his focus to the infection process. During this period, he showed that a life-threatening diarrhea prevalent in many developing countries is caused by a sub-type of E. coli. Prior to his 18-year tenure at Stanford, Dr. Falkow was professor of microbiology and medicine at the University of Washington Medical School. He also spent eleven years in Washington, DC at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research as assistant chief, Department of Bacterial Immunology and at Georgetown University Medical School, where he was a professor of microbiology.

Dr. Falkow has published hundreds of articles, and has served on the editorial boards of several professional and prestigious publications. In addition, he has received numerous awards for his achievements in science. Some of these include the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research, the Altemeier Medal from the Surgical Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Howard Taylor Ricketts Award Lecture at the University of Chicago, and the Paul Ehrlich-Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize. In 2003, he received the Abbott Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Microbiology and the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology from the National Academy of Sciences. He received the Robert Koch Award in 2000.

Dr. Falkow was elected President of the American Society for Microbiology and served from July 1997 through June 1998. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1997 and received the Maxwell-Finland Award from the National Foundation of Infectious Diseases in 1999. He also received in 1999 an Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada and the University of Maine Alumni Career Award. He has received honorary doctorates in Europe and the U.S.

Dr. Falkow is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.